Booktopia Comments: This book is not for everyone but if anyone has an interest in Australian history or enjoys Grand Gardens or gardening then you are going to have a very special gift for them. The book is packed with exquisite drawings, maps, etchings of colonial gardens and flora. It also has extremely detailed accounts and information on the people and the landscape of the time. Read the insightful quote from William Ferguson back in 1866 below. A very beautiful book and wonderful and unique gift published by Melbourne University's Miegunyah Press.
The stories of six colonial Australian gardeners and their transformation of the Australian landscape are told in this revealing look at 19th-century botany, horticulture, and plant collecting.
Original writings, wonderful illustrations, and photographs from this time period help to reveal the progress of the gardeners as they made clearings on land that they did not understand people still inhabited. Fully referenced and indexed with extensive bibliography.
Quotes from the gardeners featured in this book:
The settler subdues a piece of land, flogs it to death, abandons the carcass, and repeats the operation on a new subject. Josiah Mitchell, 1870
All nature is a garden. William Guilfoyle, 1870
Unless a stop is put to the wholesale destruction of native forests, and new forests are erected on many of our ranges, man will have much cause for regret. William Ferguson, 1866
Native plants... would become a handsome ornament to shrubberies, provided a little taste was displayed in planting them. Daniel Bunce, 1838
Reviews:
'...a thought provoking, beautifully illustrated account of how our landscape was transformed by European settlement.' Helen Young, Weekend Australian
'...a rewarding book chock full of fascinating vignettes of the interaction between soil and social class, botany and commerce, politics and personality.' Margaret Simons, Sydney Morning Herald
Sir William Macarthur -
The Colonial Grandee
Thomas Lang - The Million-plant Man
Daniel Bunce - The man on the Edge
William Guilfoyle - The Colonial Aesthete
Josiah Mitchell - The Man of the Soil
William Ferguson - The man Who Couldn't See
Click to Enlarge
